+1 for having this visible on the actual issue page, I think it's relevant you can see how many followers an issue has so you know if it's you who screwed up something or if there are a lot of people who face the same problem.

Can maintainers see what issue has the most followers in their queue ?

I thinks this is a really important tool which should be added ASAP. Having such important issue metadata hidden except to a privileged few is a real shame.

In an ideal world we'd direct would-be contributors to the most followed issues so the big ones get more attention, and resolved more quickly. This would be an invaluable tool.

This is just a vanilla View based on Flag integration with a little count() action, isn't it? Why do the OP queries need to worry about HTML in the query? Seems hacky, but perhaps I'm showing my ignorance of the internals here...